Global Warming Will Make Water Crisis Intolerable

An international meeting on the future of the world’s fresh water resources is marking World Water Day today with a renewed effort to ensure that more clean drinking water reaches the 1.1 billion people who do not have access to safe water, but the crisis is complicated by the impacts of a warming climate, an world renowned atmospheric chemist told delegates.

In addition to drinking water scarcity, about 2.6 billion people, four out of every 10, lack access to sanitation. This situation is a humanitarian crisis – dealing with it must move to the top of the global agenda say ministers and water experts meeting here for the 4th World Water Forum.

In his keynote speech to the Forum Tuesday, Nobel Prize Winner in chemistry Mario Molina warned that climate change and inappropriate water management might intensify global warming by the end of this century, creating “an intolerable risk.”

If the current global warming trend is maintained, the temperature of the planet will rise eight degrees Celsius during this century, “an increase of historic proportions,” said Molina, who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the destruction of the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbons.

..Kim Huk Su, executive secretary for the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), said that although the Asia-Pacific region has the highest economic growth rates in the world, it also has the lowest per-capita fresh water availability, and the highest number of people living below the poverty line.

ENS